Infomart


The Infomart is one of the largest buildings in Dallas, Texas. It is the world's first and only information processing marketing center.
It is located at 1950 N. Stemmons Freeway in the Market Center neighborhood between Oak Lawn and Interstate 35E near downtown. It is served by DART's Market Center Station.

History

The $85 million Infomart was opened as part of Trammell Crow's Dallas Market Center in 1985 on the site of the P.C. Cobb Stadium. It was built to serve the needs of information technology companies and provide an environment that would stimulate growth. After several years as a permanent trade show for information technology vendors, the building was sold in 1999 and 2006. The building was purchased by ASB Real Estate and currently serves as a technology office and data center, home to more than 110 technology and telecommunications companies. The property and management team were recently merged with another Data Center operator, Fortune Data Centers, to create a national operator. The combined entity will operate under the name Infomart Data Centers.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, Infomart hosted combined monthly meetings of many Dallas-area computer user groups, including those for the Apple II, Atari 8-bit family, Atari ST, and Commodore Amiga.
In April 2018, ASB sold the Infomart building and their data centers located in the building to Equinix Inc for $800 million.

Design

At spread across 7 floors and, the Infomart is one of the largest and most distinctive buildings in Dallas. The design was modeled after The Crystal Palace, a huge iron and glass building originally erected in Hyde Park in 19th century Britain to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. The Infomart used to have a reproduction of the Crystal Fountain created by the same company, Barovier & Toso.
The Infomart was built with steel frame curtain wall construction. The building's hospital-grade electrical power is supplied by 4 independent electric feeds and six in-building transformer substations, providing a very reliable source. More than 16 fiber providers have a physical presence at the Infomart, allowing 8,700 strands of fiber into the building with bandwidth capacity near 26 trillion bytes per second.

Tenants

A number of tenants are housed in the building with a mix of enterprises companies and data center providers. If an enterprise moves out, the space is absorbed by data center providers expanding in the building. Data Center providers include Equinix, zColo, Cologix, Chewy, and Flexential. Wade College is also in the building.